What Happens at A MLA Conference Stays at A MLA Conference
by rebellieing
Summary: What happens when a young English student meets James Paul Gee and his friends at a conference? She learns a little something about literacy...


The restaurant was full but quiet, a scholarly whisper in the air. I had been volunteering at the MLA conference in town, trying to get as much of a free education out of the panelists as possible when a man I had seen at a few panels invited me to dinner with a few of his friends. He introduced himself to me as James Paul Gee.

The waiter had already taken our orders but left with us a few bottles red wine and some bread.

"I define literacy as: mastery of a secondary discourse. Therefore literacy is always plural: literacies, there are many of them, since there are many secondary Discourses, and we all have some and fail to have others," Gee said, a glass of red wine sloshing in his hand as he spoke. "If one wanted to be rather pedantic and literalistic," he said looking directly at me, "then we could define literacy as: master of a secondary Discourse involving print in some fashion, which is almost all of them in a modern society."

"But what is a secondary Discourse? Or a Discourse in general, for that matter?" I ask, confused by why we started talking about literacy in the first place. "And isn't literacy just the ability to read and write? That's what I've always been told."

"A Discourse is composed of distinctive ways of speaking/listening and often, too, writing/reading coupled with distinctive ways of acting, interacting, valuing, feeling, dressing, thinking, believing with other people and with various objects, tools and technologies. Secondary Discourses are those to which people are apprenticed as part of their socializations within various local, state, and national groups and institutions outside early home and peer-group socialisation," Gee said.

"So then examples of secondary Discourses would be things like being a feminist or Third Culture Kid or a used car salesman?" I asked.

"Precisely."

"So literacy isn't just reading and writing?"

"In the broader sense." Gee takes a sip of his wine. "Janks, you look at literacy a little more narrowly, right? You call it Critical Literacy."

"Critical literacy works at the interstices of language, literacy, and power. It has to take seriously the ways in which meaning systems are implicated in reproducing domination and it has to provide access to dominant languages, literacies, and genres while simultaneously using diversity as a productive resource for redesigning social futures and for changing the horizon of possibility," Hilary Janks said, spreading the perfect amount of butter on a piece of bread. The bread was still warm, melting the butter and emitting an enticing steam.

"So literacy is a way of combating corruptible language systems. But how do you define literacy?" I asked.

"Literacy is a social practice, the patterned and conventional ways of using written language that are defined by culture and regulated by social institutions and the ability to derive meaning from a text or situation."

"It's something we do, not something we have. Interesting. It reminds me of how bell hooks describes love as a verb, not a noun." I looked at Gee and he looked back. We had both seen hooks talk at one of the panels and clearly had similar thoughts. "Love and literacy need to both be things we actively explore in order dissemble the power inherent in both. Hirsch, you look like you have something to say."

"I think if we're talking about power, we need to talk about Cultural Literacy," Hirsch said. Gee had warned me that he might go on and on talking about Cultural Literacy but hadn't explained to me beforehand what it was.

"Which is?"

"Cultural literacy constitutes the only sure avenue of opportunity for disadvantaged children, the only reliable way of combating the social determinism that now condemns them to remain in the same social and educational condition as their parents. That children from poor and illiterate homes tend to remain poor and illiterate is an unacceptable failure of our schools, one which has occured not because our teachers are inept but chiefly because they are compelled to teach a fragmented curriculum based on faulty educational theories. I propose a core body of cultural knowledge, not a prescriptive list of books but rather a descriptive list of the information actually possessed by literate Americans."

"And so literacy is then knowing the information on that list, not necessarily doing at all with reading and writing but knowledge for how to be an American. That seems to circle back to Gee and Discourses," I said.

"It always circles back to me," Gee said with a wink.


End file.
